When the night is a careless mother...

When the night isn’t so lonely;

when the lampshade isn’t the only light on

in the whole world;

when you’re not the only one awake;

when the heat is a gentle breathing upwards into the dark,

a delicious warm breath that cradles you loosely, like an arm;

when the night is a dozing mother,

young and slightly careless in her sleep…

 

When you wake up loosely

in the heat-sweet crook of night’s milk-sour embrace;

when the bluish sap of night stains the air with its must,

with its fusty damp;

when the salt of the night, the night’s motherly sweat stings,

clinging to the back of your tender neck…

when the night is a slightly careless mother

holding you closely, but loose, and heat-drugged;

when the night hums her unconscious lullaby against your ear-drums…

 

When the night is like a young wife who left the window up

to let in the waves of perfume, heady and cloying,

from a bush outside the window

with butter-pat blooms, creamy and fat and oozing,

their perfume, their purring and pulsing feline stink,

seductive, musk, filling the granular night with motherly abandon,

with a sprawled dreaminess,

a foetid, moonlight creaminess…

 

…then, the night is a young wife

exhausted by the surprise of the day,

wrung out by the winding mangle of the day.

When the night holds you softly, loosely, to its rising breast;

when the night shares your dreams, breathes when you breathe,

stirs when you stir,

its dear, blurred nightliness a barely-there embrace,

a barely-discernible, sleep-heavy mother’s face.

 

 

The Mountains and Waters sutra...

It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water.  It is not just in water.  There is a world of sentient beings in clouds.  There is a world of sentient beings in the air.  There is a world of sentient beings in fire...There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass...( A Buddhist text)

Everything is alive and wants to communicate...

"Every flower was a word, a thought.  The grass was speech; the trees were speech; the waters were speech; the winds were speech." (- George Russell, Irish poet and mystic)

Najagneg, an Inuit shaman...

...the soul of the universe has a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid.  What he says is: Be not afraid of the universe... (Joseph Campbell, The Way of Animal Powers, Vol.1)

 

Traditional Inuit Songs

!Kung shaman K"xau from the Kalahari...

I dance.  I enter the Earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel in a long way, very far.  When I emerge...I am climbing threads...I follow the thread of the wells...(Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy)

Doña Erudita del Maldiciòn de la Broma de la Puta-madré

Notas Biograficales:- Doña Erudita was born  from the union of a leprous whore and a floating saint, San Ernesto de Puta-madré.  On that accursed wedding day, the whore’s own father repaired to the village outhouse, dowsed himself in tequila and set himself on fire.  All that was left of him was a pair of purple glass eye-lids, handed down to him from a famous glass-maker and optical prosthetist from Seville.  Little Erudita was born into the hands of her father some fourteen months later, after a prolonged pregnancy.  Indeed, the local midwife had claimed that she had heard the infant speaking Castilian from inside her mother’s rabid womb.  At the age of three years, the little girl started writing poetry, which she said she heard when she put her head inside the stone holy water font at the church of St Alfonsina del Mar.  In later years, when a fireworks accident (an exploding iguana) caused Erudita to become stone deaf, she started deriving her poemas from the patterns that the geckos drew with their slime on the steps of the Jardin Botanicál de Rey in  Xoacotquetloaxcs.  On being deposed as a saint, Ernesto emigrated to the Antipodean backwater known as The Mallee, where, with three black pigs named Chancho, Tocino and Chorizo, he set up a lucrative magic mushroom-hunting business.

 

"Untouchable" published online in The Prague Review May 2015

Untouchable